Category Archives: terrorism

Loner, loser, killer

Olivier Roy writes: The murderous attack on a Jewish school, and before that on French soldiers, has brought a strong emotional reaction in France. Once again, the specter of disenfranchised and radicalized young French Muslims hovers over the destitute neighborhoods of France’s cities. Fifty years after the end of the war in Algeria, a new kind of civil war seems to be raging.

A closer look, however, shows that the picture is rather different.

First, the 23-year-old perpetrator of these acts of terror, Mohammed Merah, was a loner and a loser. Far from embodying a growing radicalization among the youth, he stood at the margins not only of French society but also of the Muslim community.

Merah was not known for his piety: He did not belong to any religious congregation; he did not belong to any radical group or even to a local Islamic movement. A petty delinquent, psychologically fragile, he tried to enlist in the French Foreign Legion and then left for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Merah found in Al Qaeda a narrative of solitary heroism and a way, after months of watching videos on the Internet, to achieve short-term notoriety and find a place in the real world. In this sense, he was far closer to Anders Behring Breivik, who went on a killing spree in Norway last July in the name of a hatred of Muslims. People like these are difficult to spot precisely because they do not belong to a network of militant cells.

Yet the crimes of such men are often misconstrued as symbolizing different problems. Whereas non-Muslim lone terrorists like Breivik tend to be called mentally ill, Muslim lone terrorists like Merah are seen as embodying “Muslim wrath.” This is to miss an essential point.

Consider Merah’s attack on the French soldiers. If his killings at the Jewish school in Toulouse were a terrible reflection of the kind of anti-Semitism typically promoted by Al Qaeda, his attack on French soldiers — specifically Muslim ones — was novel and revealing of something else. He saw the soldiers as traitors: French Muslims fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The gap he perceived between himself and them reveals the gap between the few Muslims who become so marginalized as to murder and the many more who find ways to integrate. [Continue reading…]

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Toulouse killings: making political capital out of Mohammed Merah

Nabila Ramdani writes: When young children are murdered by point-blank shots to the head, it is very difficult to draw conclusions about anything, let alone religion. The crimes Mohammed Merah has apparently confessed to are unimaginably wicked. French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, summed them up with the blunt relish of a newspaper headline writer, describing the 23-year-old killer as a “monster” who represented nothing and nobody.

However, such interpretations of what has happened in the Toulouse area over the past 10 days won’t last long. Far-right politicians have already seized on the image of the lethal young Muslim from an Algerian immigrant background. The National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who is on course to win up to 20% of the popular vote in the presidential elections beginning next month, said it was time to “launch a war” against a “fundamentalist risk which has been underestimated in our country”.

Le Pen has highlighted the fact that Merah had a French passport and was born and brought up at the expense of the republic. Even after he escaped from an Afghan prison where he was held for planting Taliban bombs, he was able to return to a council flat in Toulouse. “Homegrown” Islamic terrorists are the ultimate bogeymen for rabble-rousing politicians, and there is absolutely no doubt that the National Front’s share of the vote will increase because of this outrage.

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Woman warned French police after violent attack by Toulouse gunman in 2010

Haaretz reports: A local French newspaper published on Thursday an in-depth testimony of a woman claiming that she had warned authorities multiple times that the suspect in the Toulouse killings, Mohamed Merah, was a danger to the public.

The woman, who did not provide her real name, told Le Télégramme that upon discovering the suspect’s identity, she felt as though her “legs were cut off.” According to her, the fact that it was necessary for the deaths to occur in order to finally arrest Merah was a “huge misstep.” She further claimed that she had filed two complaints against the suspect, and returned and warned authorities several times to no avail.

The woman, who lives in the same neighborhood as Merah in Toulouse, told Le Télégramme that in the summer of 2010, the suspect attempted to recruit her son to jihad. The son, who at the time was 15 years old, was taken to the suspect’s car where he listened to a disc of preaching for holy war. He then drove her son to his apartment, where he presented him with a Koran and a large sword, and forced him to watch gruesome Al-Qaida videos in which women were shot and hostages in Afghanistan were beheaded.

“My son called me and we were finally able to get him out of there. He was there from 5 P.M. until midnight,” the woman said.

The mother filed a complaint with the police, which according to her caused Merah to become upset. “He came to the front of our home, threatened me and hit me. He said that I was an atheist and that I must pay like all the rest of France’s citizens,” she said.

She further stated that Merah claimed he would “wipe out all those who kill Muslims.” She stated that two days after the incident, Merah struck her son and daughter in the presence of eyewitnesses. However, no one intervened. The mother still has a copy of the complaint that was filed, as well as her daughter’s medical documents.

The woman also stated that the “true mind” behind the suspect was his brother Abdelkader, who is currently in police custody. “It is he who brainwashed [Merah] and often flew out of France,” she said.

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Explosions in Bangkok but no known target

The New York Times reports from Bangkok: A series of explosions rocked a residential neighborhood here on Tuesday, leading Thai authorities to a cache of bombs in a rented house and the capture of two men identified in Thai media reports as Iranians. A third suspect was being sought.

Witnesses said the three men, all of whom appeared to be foreigners, fled a house in the Sukhumvit neighborhood of Bangkok after an explosion in the early afternoon tore off the roof of the house. Two of the men ran immediately from the house, witnesses said; one was later detained at the city’s main international airport. The third man emerged shortly after the first two, seeming disoriented, with his face and ears bloodied, they said. As the third man tried to leave the area, he threw two grenades, one at a taxi and one at approaching police officers. The blast from the second struck him, however, blowing off his legs and injuring several Thais.

As of late Tuesday no evidence had emerged connecting the explosions in Bangkok with the escalating tensions between Iran and Israel. But the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, linked the explosions with the attacks on Israeli Embassy personnel on Monday in the capitals of India and Georgia, which Israel blamed on Iran and on Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group Iran backs.

“The attempted terrorist attack in Bangkok proves once again that Iran and its proxies continue to perpetrate terrorism,” Mr. Barak said. “The recent terror attacks are yet another example of this.” Mr. Barak, who had been in Bangkok for a few hours on Sunday, made his comments Tuesday in Singapore, according to a statement from his office. “Iran and Hezbollah are unrelenting terror elements endangering the stability of the region and the stability of the world,” Mr. Barak added.

It’s a bit soon to talk about the geostrategic implications of whatever happened in Bangkok. Whoever these guys were, they clearly didn’t belong to anyone’s A-team. The only thing they seemed to have to had a talent in was unintentionally blowing themselves up.

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Righteous indignation rant of the day

Glenn Greenwald writes: During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:

The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.

The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.

Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.

Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it:

Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year. Support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.

The Post‘s Greg Sargent obtained the breakdown on these questions and wrote today:

The number of those who approve of the drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number, given that these policies really should be controversial.

And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

It’s hard to imagine that Dems and liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been authored by George W. Bush.

Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.

As Greenwald’s regular readers know, he never holds back in screaming his indignation. It’s guaranteed to be a crowd please. But to go on a rant about the hypocrisy of Obama’s supporters and then stall by saying that it is mystifying, seems to me like a cop-out.

That critics of Bush’s counter-terrorism policies would refrain from criticizing Obama as he extends the reach of many of those policies is indeed hypocritical, but where does the hypocrisy come from?

From what I can tell, it is rooted in America’s collective response to 9/11. What the attacks demonstrated was the ease with which Americans can be terrorized. The willingness with which Americans of all political stripes swallowed the terrorism narrative from that day onwards was the license that guaranteed to whoever was in power, the ability to expand government power with minimal challenges so long as this was done in the name of combating terrorism.

Democrats have no more interest in questioning the imputed entities, terrorism and terrorists, than do their Republican counterparts. Why? Because to do so is to lower a barrier whose strength must be maintained if Americans want to persist in avoiding coming to terms with the humiliation of 9/11. Terrorism, we would rather believe, is a mighty force which must be boldly challenged.

The affront to American pride on that day came not from the force of the attacks but from the fact that this country could be brought to its knees by a small bunch of somewhat ordinary young men.

This is not to deny that what those young men did on that day was indeed terrible, inhumane and unjustifiable, but the massive overreaction they provoked revealed the political and social breadth and depth of American cowardice.

It is cowardice that sanctions wars, torture, assassinations, indefinite detention, and the suspension of civil liberties and that cowardice has never been less evident among Democrats than among Republicans.

But here’s one of the biggest ironies: the revival of the truism that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter is now coming from Republicans.

After this week’s revelation that Israel is training and deploying terrorists from Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) in Iran, Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin responds:

The MEK are allies of convenience and, just like many wartime allies in other conflicts, share only a common enemy with Israel. But however nasty they may be, Israel need not blush about using them. For a democracy at war, the only truly immoral thing to do would be to let totalitarian Islamists like those in Tehran triumph.

Those who look favorably on this particular alliance of convenience also have a convenient solution for the political problem of being seen to support a designated terrorist organization — they argue the designation should simply be removed.

I would go one much larger and more radical step further and argue that the designation “terrorist” has no play in law.

The function of law is to regulate behavior — not ontological status. No one gets convicted of being a murderer. They can only be found guilty of murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy to commit murder. These are all actions — not mere thoughts, intentions, or affiliations.

It’s time that more individuals in this country stood up and expressed a truth that has long been widely understood: terrorism is nothing more than a political technique employed for a psychological effect. If we separate security from politics, all we do is ensure that the political causes for the use of violence will neither be thoroughly examined nor effectively addressed.

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Radical U.S. Muslims little threat, study says

The New York Times reports: A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized, with plots and arrests dropping sharply over the two years since an unusual peak in 2009, according to a new study by a North Carolina research group.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009.

Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called terrorism by Muslim Americans “a minuscule threat to public safety.” Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.

The report also found that no single ethnic group predominated among Muslims charged in terrorism cases last year — six were of Arab ancestry, five were white, three were African-American and two were Iranian, Mr. Kurzman said. That pattern of ethnic diversity has held for those arrested since Sept. 11, 2001, he said.

Forty percent of those charged in 2011 were converts to Islam, Mr. Kurzman found, slightly higher than the 35 percent of those charged since the 2001 attacks. His new report is based on the continuation of research he conducted for a book he published last year, “The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists.”

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Another nuclear scientist assassinated in Tehran

Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan

An Iranian university professor and deputy director at Natanz enrichment facility was killed in a terrorist bomb blast in a Northern Tehran neighborhood on Wednesday morning, the Fars News Agency reports.

Some guy says this was a joint operation carried out by Mossad and the Iranian terrorist group, Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) — though when I say “some guy,” if that’s taken to imply that the source of this information is a man, I am perhaps being too specific.

Richard Silverstein heard about the Mossad-MEK connection from his “own confidential Israeli source.” This attribution of responsibility for the attack may indeed be accurate, but to describe a source no more specifically than to say that this source is an “Israeli” tells us next to nothing. It does however allow newspaper journalists to repeat this “information” as though it was news. Hence the Fars News Agency itself repeats Silverstein’s claim and tries to boost his credibility by describing him as “a senior Jewish American journalist.” Israel’s Ynet plays the same game, though with the embellishment that Silverstein’s source has been elevated to a “senior Israeli source.”

Having said all that, it seems reasonable to assume that this attack — an attack that were it to take place anywhere outside Iran would widely be described as a terrorist attack — was conducted with the direct or indirect involvement of the Israeli and/or United States governments.

One of the strange ethical anomalies of the era in which we live is that an American president willingly accepts responsibility for authorizing assassinations conducted by special forces or drone-launched Hellfire missiles, even though in both types of operation the target may be mistaken and innocent bystanders frequently get killed, yet no government official is willing to claim responsibility for a cold-blooded murder. For the killing to be legitimized it has to given the legal pretext that it is being conducted on a “battlefield” during a “war.”

For as long as the streets of Tehran are not regarded as a battlefield and neither the United States nor Israel is officially at war with Iran, no one will acknowledge that a campaign of state terrorism is indeed being waged, since to do so would be offer an open invitation for Iran to respond in kind.

Bloomberg reports:

Today’s attack “comes in the middle of heightened tensions and it helps Iran to play on a sense of threat that it is under a lot of pressure,” Gala Riani, a Middle East analyst at London-based forecaster IHS Global Insight, said by telephone. “It can also be beneficial to more extremist elements in the government who are supporting further military drills in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran conducted naval exercises near the Strait of Hormuz for 10 days that ended early this month.

Previous attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists include the assassination of Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, killed by a bomb outside his Tehran home in January 2010, and an explosion in November of that year that took the life of Majid Shahriari and wounded Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

Oil pared losses of as much as 0.6 percent after the report on Roshan’s death. Crude for February delivery was at $102.25 a barrel, up 1 cent, in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 4:06 p.m. Singapore time.

“While it is difficult to gauge the impact of the scientists’ deaths on the country’s nuclear development, Iranian officials have already acknowledged they have a human-resources problem in the program largely because of the sharp political differences within the country,” Meir Javedanfar, lecturer on Iranian politics at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, said in a telephone interview.

The explosion follows an Iranian court’s Jan. 9 decision to sentence an American of Iranian descent, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, to death for spying. U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said allegations that Hekmati worked for the CIA were “simply untrue.”

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Does airport security really make us safer?

Charles C. Mann writes: Not until I walked with Bruce Schneier toward the mass of people unloading their laptops did it occur to me that it might not be possible for us to hang around unnoticed near Reagan National Airport’s security line. Much as upscale restaurants hang mug shots of local food writers in their kitchens, I realized, the Transportation Security Administration might post photographs of Schneier, a 48-year-old cryptographer and security technologist who is probably its most relentless critic. In addition to writing books and articles, Schneier has a popular blog; a recent search for “TSA” in its archives elicited about 2,000 results, the vast majority of which refer to some aspect of the agency that he finds to be ineffective, invasive, incompetent, inexcusably costly, or all four.

As we came by the checkpoint line, Schneier described one of these aspects: the ease with which people can pass through airport security with fake boarding passes. First, scan an old boarding pass, he said—more loudly than necessary, it seemed to me. Alter it with Photoshop, then print the result with a laser printer. In his hand was an example, complete with the little squiggle the T.S.A. agent had drawn on it to indicate that it had been checked. “Feeling safer?” he asked.

Ten years ago, 19 men armed with utility knives hijacked four airplanes and within a few hours killed nearly 3,000 people. At a stroke, Americans were thrust into a menacing new world. “They are coming after us,” C.I.A. director George Tenet said of al-Qaeda. “They intend to strike this homeland again, and we better get about the business of putting the right structure in place as fast as we can.”

The United States tried to do just that. Federal and state governments embarked on a nationwide safety upgrade. Checkpoints proliferated in airports, train stations, and office buildings. A digital panopticon of radiation scanners, chemical sensors, and closed-circuit television cameras audited the movements of shipping containers, airborne chemicals, and ordinary Americans. None of this was or will be cheap. Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

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The real definition of terrorism

Glenn Greenwald writes: The FBI yesterday announced it has secured an indictment against Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, a 38-year-old citizen of Iraq currently in Canada, from which the U.S. is seeking his extradition. The headline on the FBI’s Press Release tells the basic story: “Alleged Terrorist Indicted in New York for the Murder of Five American Soldiers.” The criminal complaint previously filed under seal provides the details: ‘Isa is charged with “providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy” because he allegedly supported a 2008 attack on a U.S. military base in Mosul that killed 5 American soldiers. In other words, if the U.S. invades and occupies your country, and you respond by fighting back against the invading army — the ultimate definition of a “military, not civilian target” — then you are a . . . Terrorist.

Here is how the complaint, in the first paragraph, summarizes the Terrorism charge against ‘Isa:

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America’s secret terrorist prison system

The New York Times reports: It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.

An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.

Among them is Ismail Royer, serving 20 years for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In a letter from the highest-security prison in the United States, Mr. Royer describes his remarkable neighbors at twice-a-week outdoor exercise sessions, each prisoner alone in his own wire cage under the Colorado sky. “That’s really the only interaction I have with other inmates,” he wrote from the federal Supermax, 100 miles south of Denver.

There is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Mr. Royer wrote. Terry Nichols, who conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Ahmed Ressam, the would-be “millennium bomber,” who plotted to attack Los Angeles International Airport. And Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

In recent weeks, Congress has reignited an old debate, with some arguing that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. But military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantánamo hugely costly — $800,000 per inmate a year, compared with $25,000 in federal prison.

The criminal justice system, meanwhile, has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity, and without the international criticism that Guantánamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial.

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Senate votes not to vote on indefinite detention on Americans

Adam Serwer writes: Can Americans be indefinitely detained by the military on suspicion of terrorism if arrested on American soil? Thursday evening the Senate added a compromise amendment to the defense spending bill that states: Maybe. Specifically, it says the bill does not alter current authorities relating to detention, leaving either side free to argue whether current law allows or prohibits indefinite military detention of Americans captured in the US.

The compromise amendment passed by a 99-1 after a previous effort by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) that would have explicitly prevented the indefinite detention of Americans without trial failed 45-55. Several Democrats joined Republicans in blocking the latter amendment with Republican Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) Rand Paul (R-Ky) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill) joining most Democrats in voting for Feinstein’s amendment.

The reason the compromise amendment worked is that it leaves the question of domestic military detention open, leaving the matter for Supreme Court to resolve should a future president decide to assert the authority to detain a US citizen on American soil. Senators who defended the detention provisions can continue to say that current law allows Americans to be detained based on the 2004 Hamdi v Rumsfeld case in which an American captured fighting in Afghanistan was held in military detention. Opponents can continue to point out that the Hamdi case doesn’t resolve whether or not Americans can be detained indefinitely without charge if captured in their own country, far from any declared battlefield. They have the better of the argument.

Dahlia Lithwick writes: The detainee language only makes us all safer if you assume that “they” are always guilty whenever the government says so. It’s the job of the courts to decide whether the government is right. Justice Antonin Scalia himself put it this way: “Where the Government accuses a citizen of waging war against it, our constitutional tradition has been to prosecute him in federal court for treason or some other crime. … The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.”

One of the two Republican senators to vote for the Udall Amendment yesterday was Sen. Rand Paul, who quoted Thomas Jefferson: “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home.” No. Truer. Words. At this moment in America we seem to be so fond of dividing Americans into us and them that we have created all sorts of intriguing new legal double standards for the thems. Don’t think for a minute that these new powers will be used only against suspected terrorists. We already know that suspected illegal immigrants, suspected environmental activists, and suspected protesters have very different legal rights—which is to say, far more limited rights—than anyone else. And as Benjamin Wallace Wells detailed last August, the landmark anti-terror legislation known as the Patriot Act has, in the 10 years since its passage, been used in 1,618 drug cases and 15 terrorism cases. You’d never know it from watching the GOP hopefuls joyfully demonize women, immigrants, the poor, the prisoners, OWS protesters, and union members, but at some point, them always becomes us.

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Iranian exile terrorist group has bipartisan support in Washington

The New York Times reports: At a time of partisan gridlock in the capital, one obscure cause has drawn a stellar list of supporters from both parties and the last two administrations, including a dozen former top national security officials.

That alone would be unusual. What makes it astonishing is the object of their attention: a fringe Iranian opposition group, long an ally of Saddam Hussein, that is designated as a terrorist organization under United States law and described by State Department officials as a repressive cult despised by most Iranians and Iraqis.

The extraordinary lobbying effort to reverse the terrorist designation of the group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, has won the support of two former C.I.A. directors, R. James Woolsey and Porter J. Goss; a former F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh; a former attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey; President George W. Bush’s first homeland security chief, Tom Ridge; President Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; big-name Republicans like the former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Democrats like the former Vermont governor Howard Dean; and even the former top counterterrorism official of the State Department, Dell L. Dailey, who argued unsuccessfully for ending the terrorist label while in office.

The American advocates have been well paid, hired through their speaking agencies and collecting fees of $10,000 to $50,000 for speeches on behalf of the Iranian group. Some have been flown to Paris, Berlin and Brussels for appearances.

Tom Ridge expresses the sentiment and rationale shared by most of the MEK’s Washington supporters: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. No doubt the MEK itself used the same reasoning when aligning itself with Saddam Hussein (as did the U.S.). For the MEK’s current allies in Washington it apparently matters little that the organization actually has a long history of befriending America’s enemies and opposing America’s friends — but maybe that says more about the capricious nature of American friendship than it says about the MEK.

Maybe the solution is not the removal of the MEK from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Instead, the U.S. government can simply start designating countries and organizations as “Enemies” and “Friends” and then at the beginning of the springtime awards season, before the Oscars, there can be a televised event where the president hands out awards and opprobrium to this year’s winners in each category.

As far as what might be the implications for Iran (apart from continuation of the current campaign of terrorism targeting Iranian scientists), there is one curious dimension to the support the MEK now enjoys in Washington: the defining event in modern US-Iranian relations — the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran — turns out not to have been so unforgivable as it is generally portrayed.

“MEK members participated in and supported the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and … the MEK later argued against the early release the American hostages,” says the State Department. But let’s not dwell on the past, says Woolsey, Ridge et al.

On the other hand, for those who retain an interest in the past and the State Department’s description of the MEK’s activities, here it is:

The group’s worldwide campaign against the Iranian government uses propaganda and terrorism to achieve its objectives. During the 1970s, the MEK staged terrorist attacks inside Iran and killed several U.S. military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran. In 1972, the MEK set off bombs in Tehran at the U.S. Information Service office (part of the U.S. Embassy), the Iran-American Society, and the offices of several U.S. companies to protest the visit of President Nixon to Iran. In 1973, the MEK assassinated the deputy chief of the U.S. Military Mission in Tehran and bombed several businesses, including Shell Oil. In 1974, the MEK set off bombs in Tehran at the offices of U.S. companies to protest the visit of then U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger. In 1975, the MEK assassinated two U.S. military officers who were members of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Tehran. In 1976, the MEK assassinated two U.S. citizens who were employees of Rockwell International in Tehran. In 1979, the group claimed responsibility for the murder of an American Texaco executive. Though denied by the MEK, analysis based on eyewitness accounts and MEK documents demonstrates that MEK members participated in and supported the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and that the MEK later argued against the early release the American hostages. The MEK also provided personnel to guard and defend the site of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, following the takeover of the Embassy.

In 1981, MEK leadership attempted to overthrow the newly installed Islamic regime; Iranian security forces subsequently initiated a crackdown on the group. The MEK instigated a bombing campaign, including an attack against the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister’s office, which killed some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials, including Chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, President Mohammad-Ali Rajaei, and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar. These attacks resulted in an expanded Iranian government crackdown that forced MEK leaders to flee to France. For five years, the MEK continued to wage its terrorist campaign from its Paris headquarters. Expelled by France in 1986, MEK leaders turned to Saddam Hussein’s regime for basing, financial support, and training. Near the end of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Baghdad armed the MEK with heavy military equipment and deployed thousands of MEK fighters in suicidal, mass wave attacks against Iranian forces.

The MEK’s relationship with the former Iraqi regime continued through the 1990s. In 1991, the group reportedly assisted the Iraqi Republican Guard’s bloody crackdown on Iraqi Shia and Kurds who rose up against Saddam Hussein’s regime. In April 1992, the MEK conducted near-simultaneous attacks on Iranian embassies and consular missions in 13 countries, including against the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York, demonstrating the group’s ability to mount large-scale operations overseas. In June 1998, the MEK was implicated in a series of bombing and mortar attacks in Iran that killed at least 15 and injured several others. The MEK also assassinated the former Iranian Minister of Prisons in 1998. In April 1999, the MEK targeted key Iranian military officers and assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi.

In April 2000, the MEK attempted to assassinate the commander of the Nasr Headquarters, Tehran’s interagency board responsible for coordinating policies on Iraq. The pace of anti-Iranian operations increased during “Operation Great Bahman” in February 2000, when the group launched a dozen attacks against Iran. One attack included a mortar attack against a major Iranian leadership complex in Tehran that housed the offices of the Supreme Leader and the President. The attack killed one person and injured six other individuals. In March 2000, the MEK launched mortars into a residential district in Tehran, injuring four people and damaging property. In 2000 and 2001, the MEK was involved in regular mortar attacks and hit-and-run raids against Iranian military and law enforcement personnel, as well as government buildings near the Iran-Iraq border. Following an initial Coalition bombardment of the MEK’s facilities in Iraq at the outset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, MEK leadership negotiated a cease-fire with Coalition Forces and surrendered their heavy-arms to Coalition control. Since 2003, roughly 3,400 MEK members have been encamped at Ashraf in Iraq.

In 2003, French authorities arrested 160 MEK members at operational bases they believed the MEK was using to coordinate financing and planning for terrorist attacks. Upon the arrest of MEK leader Maryam Rajavi, MEK members took to Paris’ streets and engaged in self-immolation. French authorities eventually released Rajavi.

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Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI ‘entrapment’ questioned

The Guardian reports: David Williams did not have an easy life. He moved to Newburgh, a gritty, impoverished town on the banks of the Hudson an hour or so north of New York, at just 10 years old. For a young, black American boy with a father in jail, trouble was everywhere.

Williams also made bad choices. He ended up going to jail for dealing drugs. When he came out in 2007 he tried to go straight, but money was tight and his brother, Lord, needed cash for a liver transplant. Life is hard in Newburgh if you are poor, have a drug rap and need cash quickly.

His aunt, Alicia McWilliams, was honest about the tough streets her nephew was dealing with. “Newburgh is a hard place,” she said. So it was perhaps no surprise that in May, 2009, David Williams was arrested again and hit with a 25-year jail sentence. But it was not for drugs offences. Or any other common crime. Instead Williams and three other struggling local men beset by drug, criminal and mental health issues were convicted of an Islamic terrorist plot to blow up Jewish synagogues and shoot down military jets with missiles.

Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists. It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack. For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it. “I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone,” she told the Guardian.

Lawyers for the so-called Newburgh Four have now launched an appeal that will be held early next year. Advocates hope the case offers the best chance of exposing the issue of FBI “entrapment” in terror cases. “We have as close to a legal entrapment case as I have ever seen,” said Susanne Brody, who represents another Newburgh defendant, Onta Williams.

Some experts agree. “The target, the motive, the ideology and the plot were all led by the FBI,” said Karen Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who specialises in studying the new FBI tactics.

But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities, hang out in mosques and community centres, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideals. Or they will respond to the most bizarre of tip-offs, including, in one case, a man who claimed to have seen terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri living in northern California in the late 1990s.

That tipster was quickly hired as a well-paid informant. If suitable suspects are identified, FBI agents then run a sting, often creating a fake terror plot in which it helps supply weapons and targets. Then, dramatic arrests are made, press conferences held and lengthy convictions secured.

But what is not clear is if many real, actual terrorists are involved.

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Israel behind deadly explosion at Iran missile base?

Whether it was the result of an Israeli covert operation, or, as Iran claims, an accident, the latest deadly incident once again highlights the willingness of the United States and Israel to engage in acts of violence that were they instigated by Iran or any other state or non-state actor would simply be called acts of terrorism.

Karl Vick reports: Israeli newspapers on Sunday were thick with innuendo, the front pages of the three largest dailies dominated by variations on the headline “Mysterious Explosion in Iranian Missile Base.” Turn the page, and the mystery is answered with a wink. “Who Is Responsible for Attacks on the Iranian Army?” asks Maariv, and the paper lists without further comment a half-dozen other violent setbacks to Iran’s nuclear and military nexus. For Israeli readers, the coy implication is that their own government was behind Saturday’s massive blast just outside Tehran. It is an assumption a Western intelligence source insists is correct: the Mossad — the Israeli agency charged with covert operations — did it. “Don’t believe the Iranians that it was an accident,” the official tells TIME, adding that other sabotage is being planned to impede the Iranian ability to develop and deliver a nuclear weapon. “There are more bullets in the magazine,” the official says.

The powerful blast or series of blasts — reports described an initial explosion followed by a much larger one — devastated a missile base in the gritty urban sprawl to the west of the Iranian capital. The base housed Shahab missiles, which, at their longest range, can reach Israel. Last week’s report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran had experimented with removing the conventional warhead on the Shahab-3 and replacing it with one that would hold a nuclear device. Iran says the explosion was an accident that came while troops were transferring ammunition out of the depot “toward the appropriate site.” (See why ties between the U.S. and Iran are under threat.)

The explosion killed at least 17 people, including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, described by Iranian state media as a pioneer in Iranian missile development and the Revolutionary Guard commander in charge of “ensuring self-sufficiency” in armaments, a challenging task in light of international sanctions.

Coming the weekend after the release of the unusually critical IAEA report, which laid out page upon page of evidence that Iran is moving toward a nuclear weapon, the blast naturally sharpened concern over Israel’s threat to launch airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Half the stories on the Tehran Times website on Sunday referenced the possibility of a military strike, most warning of dire repercussions.

But the incident also argued, maybe even augured, against an outright strike. If Israel — perhaps in concert with Washington and other allies — can continue to inflict damage to the Iranian nuclear effort through covert actions, the need diminishes for overt, incendiary moves like air strikes. The Stuxnet computer worm bollixed Iran’s centrifuges for months, wreaking havoc on the crucial process of uranium enrichment.

And in Sunday’s editions, the Hebrew press coyly listed what Yedioth Ahronoth called “Iran’s Mysterious Mishaps.” The tallies ran from the November 2007 explosion at a missile base south of Tehran to the October 2010 blast at a Shahab facility in southwestern Iran, to the assassinations of three Iranian scientists working in the nuclear program — two last year and one in July.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports:

Barack Obama’s push for consensus over renewed concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme have had a lukewarm response from the Russian and Chinese leaders attending the APEC summit in Hawaii.

The US president had sought support from Dmitry Medvedev and Hu Jintao as he seeks to rein back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but he got no public endorsement from either of them.

Obama met his counterparts on Sunday on the sidelines of the summit in Honolulu, the capital of his home state, where he discussed a UN nuclear watchdog report that said there was “credible” information that Tehran may have worked on developing nuclear weapons.

Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, reporting from Honolulu, said there was “absolutely no consensus” between the leaders on how to deal with Iran following the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report.

“This was President Obama’s first face-to-face meeting with Hu and Medvedev since the IAEA report came out. The US believes that it needs China and Russia to get on board with sanctions and it was fairly clear … that he did not get any reassurances,” she said.

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Israeli government backs Jewish terrorism

Yossi Gurvitz writes: Brigadier General Nitzan Alon, who left the command of the AYOSH (West Bank) Division yesterday, spoke candidly during his replacement ceremony, and called the “price tag” actions by their true name: Jewish terrorism. Alon, who was repeatedly harassed by the settlers, demanded that more be done in the battle against it (Hebrew). One could, of course, ask why didn’t Alon himself (who as the “military commander” in the West Bank wields the combined powers of a British occupying general and a Turkish pasha) commence this battle; why didn’t he order the destruction of the houses of suspected Jewish terrorists as the IDF destroys the houses of the families of Palestinian suspects; why didn’t he put rebellious settlements under curfew, as many Palestinians towns and villages have been so often?

But this is just me being ornery. The questions answer themselves. The apartheid regime Israel created in the West Bank over decades, and the political power of the terrorists and their supporters, prohibits an effective fight against them. The apartheid system, the double legal system – military for the natives, Israeli for the invaders – has been described often enough. Let’s focus on the fact that many prefer to avoid: Jewish terrorism in the territories is directly supported by the Israeli government, and to a large extent is also funded by it.

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Scientists’ analysis disputes FBI closing of anthrax case

The New York Times reports: A decade after wisps of anthrax sent through the mail killed 5 people, sickened 17 others and terrorized the nation, biologists and chemists still disagree on whether federal investigators got the right man and whether the F.B.I.’s long inquiry brushed aside important clues.

Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated. The scientists make their case in a coming issue of the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense.

F.B.I. documents reviewed by The New York Times show that bureau scientists focused on tin early in their eight-year investigation, calling it an “element of interest” and a potentially critical clue to the criminal case. They later dropped their lengthy inquiry, never mentioned tin publicly and never offered any detailed account of how they thought the powder had been made.

The new paper raises the prospect — for the first time in a serious scientific forum — that the Army biodefense expert identified by the F.B.I. as the perpetrator, Bruce E. Ivins, had help in obtaining his germ weapons or conceivably was innocent of the crime.

Both the chairwoman of a National Academy of Science panel that spent a year and a half reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work and the director of a new review by the Government Accountability Office said the paper raised important questions that should be addressed.

Alice P. Gast, president of Lehigh University and the head of the academy panel, said that the paper “points out connections that deserve further consideration.”

Dr. Gast, a chemical engineer, said the “chemical signatures” in the mailed anthrax and their potential value to the criminal investigation had not been fully explored. “It just wasn’t pursued as vigorously as the microbiology,” she said, alluding to the analysis of micro-organisms. She also noted that the academy panel suggested a full review of classified government research on anthrax, which her panel never saw.

In interviews, the three authors said their analysis suggested that the F.B.I. might have pursued the wrong suspect and that the case should be reopened. Their position may embolden calls for a national commission to investigate the first major bioterrorist attack in American history.

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